Lightning Strikes Twice: A Gold Mine of Insight

Monday, August 4, 2014

The shamanic practitioner I met with last November, Dr. Mary Rutherford, directed me to the writings of Rudolph Steiner after reading one of my recent blog posts.  In the mere twenty-four hours since she gently nudged me in the direction of Steiner’s teachings I have been googling materials related to that stage of childhood development that corresponds to when a child is nine years old.  As I have read through what I have been able to make time for since yesterday evening I have found myself virtually entranced by the materials I have read thus far.  One way to confirm you are having an ‘Ah Ha’ moment is to pay close attention to your inner world.  Is it quiet and calm or full of energy?

In reading the writings I have found thus far I feel I have committed the equivalent of lighting the fuse to a stack of dynamite.  I have a feeling a lot of insight is going to come to me soon whether I want it or not.  All I have to do is pop open my laptop, get online and open the doors to any number of portals of information.  If I let the world in thoroughly I will find my way to the answers I seek.  The challenge for me is to let the world in without fearing that I will be consumed…or destroyed.  That’s old programming from my earliest years of life.

I very much want insight but I prefer that it not be accompanied by pain.  But sometimes insight is so deeply intertwined with pain that you cannot really separate them.  To discover exuberance and freedom you first might have to fall into an abyss unlike anything you have ever experienced.

One website I discovered described the ‘nine-year-change’ in the following way:

“The nine-year-change is a momentous occasion in the life of a child according to an anthroposophic perspective.  Roberto Trostli writes in “Rhythms of Learning:  Selected Lectures by Rudolf Steiner”:  ‘Like Adam and Eve in Paradise, young children live in peace and harmony with their environment, intimately connected to their surroundings, full of trust and confidence in the world.  When children turn nine, this trusting, secure, relationship to the world begins to change.’”

There’s only one problem with this description of life as experienced up until the age of nine years.  It runs completely counter to what was my own experience!

“Young children live in peace and harmony with their environment” – Yeah, sorry but that wasn’t my experience.  Peace and harmony were foreign concepts in my earliest years.  I experienced the opposite, namely chaos, strife and stress.  There was no Garden of Eden to take refuge in.

“Full of trust and confidence in the world” – This was also the complete opposite of what I felt.  I didn’t have any trust and confidence in the world.  By the time I turned nine years old I was confident that the world was going to let me down and fail me time and time again.  By the time I turned nine years old my mother had suffered a schizophrenic breakdown and returned to Germany, I had been verbally and physically abused by my stepsisters, my father had been nearly murdered by my first stepmother, my father’s second marriage had consequently ended and I was then returned to my father’s custody nonetheless.

“When children turn nine, this trusting, secure relationship to the world begins to change.” – I suppose it is accurate to say that the age of nine is when my capacities for cynicism, bitterness, suspiciousness and aloofness became firmly cemented within my psyche.  It became easier not to care and not to trust. 

The Parenting Passageway website later goes on to reference Lois Cusick’s book entitled “The Waldorf Parenting Handbook”.  Here again is another quote:

“A more intense sense of self shakes the child’s unquestioned feeling of belonging, of unity with all around him.  Suddenly the others look farther away, alien.  The thought comes, ‘Perhaps I do not belong.’  The increasingly aware child looks more keenly at the real world of adults around him.  Now it is up to the teachers and parents to show the child that they see and understand what is happening to him, that he does belong, and in a new, more socially conscious way.”  House-building, agriculture, gardening – all fit in well with a child during this nine-year-old change who is starting to realize the interconnectedness and interdependence of humans. 

As I reflect on this statement in conjunction with my own life history around the time I was nine years old I have this to offer:

Did I have an ‘unquestioned feeling of belonging’?  I don’t know.  But I can say I didn’t want to belong to a household filled with so much chaos and dysfunction.  Who wants to be the kid in the neighborhood whose father manages his affairs so poorly that his own spouse nearly successfully murders him?  I felt like an alien in the household.  And given how much chaos and dysfunction I had already been through by the age of nine I sense I must have come to some unconscious conclusion that it was wisest to always remain aloof and cool with people.  I didn’t really have teachers or a parent (let alone two of them) during the time I was a nine year old boy to show that they saw and understood what was happening to me.  I didn’t receive reinforcement that I belonged.  I belonged to a family that I fantasized about running away from.  And because major institutions like the local police department also failed me I became cynical and mistrusting.

In short, I was not a carefree nine year old boy.  By the time I turned nine years old the poisonous impact of what I had gone through had done a lot of damage.

I plan to speak about what I can recall from when I was nine years old when I see my therapist an hour from now.  I have an interview to prepare for tomorrow morning and I intend to be well rested and as metaphorically bushy tailed as possible.